Search results matching tags 'IIS News Item' and 'Bit Rate Throttling'

IIS Media Services 3.0, including IIS Live Smooth Streaming, has been released

chriskno — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:31:00 GMT

What Just Happened?

We just released IIS Media Services 3.0, a set of extensions for Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) that provide an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform. This includes the new IIS Live Smooth Streaming and the separate IIS Advanced Logging package.

In addition, we released the beta of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight. Supported features include PlayReady, DVR controls, instant replay, slow motion, multiple camera angles, alternate audio tracks, content protection, ad integration, in-stream data feeds, and more.

Market Impact

Since April, 2009, key broadcasters around the world have used beta versions of IIS Media Services 3.0 to successfully broadcast some of the world's premier live events. These include the Tour de France and the Roland Garros 2009 International French Open Tennis Tournament on France Télévisions; the IAAF Athletics World Championships and FINA Swimming World Championships on both France Télévisions and RAI; the FIFA Confederations Cup South Africa 2009 on RAI; and Champions League Soccer on BSkyB; as well as events such as the Michael Jackson Memorial on Sympatico/MSN inMusic and SKY News. In a combined effort with Microsoft, NBC Sports and others, Wimbledon Live delivered more than 6,500 minutes of live and on-demand Smooth Streaming video via a high-definition (HD), interactive online video experience. Each Sunday this Fall, NBC and Microsoft are broadcasting Sunday Night Football on-line in HD, utilizing live DVR controls, multiple camera angles, slow motion, ad integration, analytics, and other cutting-edge features. 26 such trial deployments are currently highlighted on the Smooth Streaming Showcase.

Component Overview

With this release, the key elements of the IIS media server platform now include:

Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP
Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events
Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, for creating custom clients
Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player
Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content
Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging
Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Download the latest IIS Media offerings

You can download all of the IIS media server platform components using the Web Platform Installer button on the IIS Media page (http://www.iis.net/media).

Key new features:

See these blog posts to learn more about the key new features that are part of this release:

IIS Live Smooth Streaming: http://blogs.iis.net/jboch/archive/2009/10/09/rtw-of-live-smooth-streaming-is-now-live.aspx
IIS Advanced Logging: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/12/iis-advanced-logging-1-0-released.aspx
IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit – Beta 1: http://blogs.iis.net/vsood/archive/2009/10/09/iis-smooth-streaming-player-development-kit-1-0-beta-1-released.aspx

Give the IIS Media server platform a try, and let us know what you think on our Forum.

-Chris

IIS Media Pack 1.0 Released

chriskno — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:19:29 GMT

Following up on our Smooth Streaming announcement last week, today we released IIS Media Pack 1.0! This first release of the IIS Media Pack features two IIS 7.0 extensions that focus on the intelligent delivery of video and audio to end users: Bit Rate Throttling, and Web Playlists.

Bit Rate Throttling

Bit Rate Throttling gives Web server administrators the ability to automatically meter the delivery of 11 built-in media file types, including Windows Media Video (.wmv), Flash Video (.flv), and MPEG-4 (.mp4) files. Additional media formats can be added, as can any non-media file type. By controlling how fast or how much data is downloaded to the client, site operators can see significant bandwidth cost savings for rich media content that has a high drop-off rate, such as videos on popular social media sites. When bandwidth is a concern, reducing the amount of data being sent to end users can increase the number of concurrent users per server.

Another feature of Bit Rate Throttling is dynamic throttling. When enabled, IIS can dynamically split your total available bandwidth allocation across all concurrent users. If you are billed for network usage based on a peak usage billing model, rather than number of datas transferred, this equitably shares extra available bandwidth among all of your users. As new users start to consume the extra bandwidth, dynamic throttling reduces bandwidth to each user, but ensures that the allocated bandwidth for each user will not fall below the specified bit rate for the content being consumed.

Web Playlists

Web Playlists let you deliver server-controlled media playlists from your Web server infrastructure, rather than using a dedicated streaming server. They enable you to control whether clients can Seek or Skip for each media asset, which lends itself very well to monetizing your content with pre-roll and in-stream ads. Web Playlists also obfuscate the location of media assets from the end user, and prevent client-side caching of those assets.

Web Playlists are simple to create and deliver. They are based on a standard playlist format (SMIL), are transformable to other common playlist types, and can be used with many popular media players. If you have existing business applications written in ASP, PHP, etc. to personalize the end user experience, it can be used with Web Playlists on your IIS 7.0 server to provide custom media playlists.

Call to Action

Download and try out the new IIS Media Pack 1.0 release! Add your comments below, or join us in the IIS Media forum, to let us know how well IIS Media Pack 1.0 meets your needs, and how we can make it even better for the next release.

Resources

IIS Media overview

Bit Rate Throttling details

Web Playlists details

IIS Media Pack downloads: 32-bit; 64-bit

Bit Rate Throttling is now released

vsood — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Bit Rate Throttling is now out of Beta. We are really pleased to announced the release of IIS Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling

Download Links

The key features that constitute V 1.0 of Bit Rate Throttling are:

Automatically reads the encoded bit rate information from each defined media file type
Per-response bandwidth limiting on progressive downloads for every connection
Throttling rules are configurable at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels
Fast Start experience for end users
Extensible to add support for other media and file formats
Fully integrated into the IIS7 administration and configuration models
Set default and maximum throttling rates, and concurrent connection limits
NEW - Dynamically adjust throttling to account for any available bandwidth as per a configured value (watch out for another post on this shortly)

For more information, see the Bit Rate Throttling walkthroughs:

Bit Rate Throttling Setup Walkthrough. Describes how to download and install the Bit Rate Throttling module.
Bit Rate Throttling Configuration Walkthrough. Describes how to configure the Bit Rate Throttling module at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels, including new Site-level limits.
Bit Rate Throttling Extensibility Walkthrough. Describes how to use the extensibility interface provided by the Rate Throttling module to add support for additional media file types.

I cannot end this post without thanking the team for tremendous hard work. Thank you all!

Andrew, Sam, Jack and Brian for coding it
Jimin and Dave Cox for testing it
David Nelson for all the help content that ships with this release
And of course, I was the PM ;) (It's my post so I get to thank myself)
Chris (PM), for helping out with all earlier releases. We would not have got so far without that.
Mike, for envisioning this idea and doing early prototypes. We would not have this feature without him :)

Bit Rate Throttling is a great value add to the progressive download scenarios. Don't believe me, try it out to believe for yourself. We had fun making it hope you enjoy using the same.

Go Live (and save money) with Bit Rate Throttling!

chriskno — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:18:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that the latest version of Bit Rate Throttling, an Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7) Media Pack feature, is now available for download! This updated version adds additional controls to help an administrator ensure a reliable and consistent end-user experience, particularly when serving video content. For many scenarios, this feature will reduce bandwidth costs while increasing per-server capacity for concurrent download connections.

Bit Rate Throttling allows a Web administrator or site operator to:

Easily and automatically provide metered delivery of media and data downloads
Significantly reduce bandwidth costs for audio/video content that has high drop-off rates
Increase the number of concurrent users that can be supported per serverThis is a Go Live beta release, which means you can deploy this in live production environments. See http://www.iis.net/golive for details of the Go Live program.

Key features:

Automatically reads the encoded bit rate information from each defined media file type
Per-response bandwidth limiting on progressive downloads for every connection
Throttling rules are configurable at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels
Fast Start experience for end users
Extensible to add support for other media and file formats
Fully integrated into the IIS7 administration and configuration models
NEW – Set default and maximum throttling rates, and concurrent connection limits

Click here for the 64 bit version; click here for the 32 bit version.

For more information, see the Bit Rate Throttling walkthroughs:

Bit Rate Throttling Setup Walkthrough. Describes how to download and install the Bit Rate Throttling module.
Bit Rate Throttling Configuration Walkthrough. Describes how to configure the Bit Rate Throttling module at the server, site, virtual directory, and file levels, including new Site-level limits.
Bit Rate Throttling Extensibility Walkthrough. Describes how to use the extensibility interface provided by the Rate Throttling module to add support for additional media file types.

-Chris

Announcing the Bit Rate Throttling module Customer Technology Preview

chriskno — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:23:00 GMT

Bit Rate Throttling, the first feature in the upcoming IIS7 Media Pack, is now available for download at http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1522.

The IIS7 Bit Rate Throttling module was first announced at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show last April as part of the TCO advantage for Silverlight. It enables Web administrators to throttle the delivery of any file based on the file type, with additional functionality for digital audio/video files. Throttling can be set at the following levels within Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager: server, site, virtual directory, and file.

For audio and video files, this module automatically detects the encoded bit rate of the file, sends a short burst of data to the client at full throttle to ensure a fast start to their playback experience, and then delivers the content at a throttled rate that is equal to or slightly greater than the encoded bit rate. Several popular digital media file types are pre-defined in the module, and others can be added. Data files are throttled at a configurable constant rate.

The Bit Rate Throttling module includes the following key features:

· Integration with IIS 7.0. The Bit Rate Throttling module is tightly integrated with this new administration interface and configuration store in IIS 7.0. In addition, IIS 7.0 has a new administration tool, and the new Bit Rate Throttling module plugs seamlessly into that paradigm.

· Throttling for any file type. Any file type can be throttled at a constant rate. An administrator can easily specify a new file type and throttling settings through the user interface.

· Advanced media throttling. One of the most significant features in the new Bit Rate Throttling module is the advanced support of audio/video media formats. This includes automatic detection of the encoded bit rate in a file, and intelligent progressive-download throttling based on that. Built-in support is included for digital media with the following file name extensions: .asf, .avi, .flv, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .rm, .rmvb, .wma, .wmv. An administrator can simply enable Bit Rate Throttling and start intelligently delivering these common media types using the default throttling settings.

· Extensibility. The new Bit Rate Throttling module supports developer extensibility, making it possible for software vendors and hobbyists to add support for additional media formats using simple XML editing. Microsoft is using this extensibility feature to implement the built-in media format support.

· Shared hosting support. By fully integrating into the IIS 7.0 pipeline and configuration model, the new Bit Rate Throttling module makes it possible to host Web page content and intelligently deliver a variety of media from the same Web server, site, or virtual directory. This level of granularity also provides the ability to isolate users through per-user virtual directories.

Bryan Fleming and Eric Woersching have both written about the Bit Rate Throttling value proposition provided by this module for folks who are hosting media content on Web servers. If you are wondering whether to deliver media content using IIS7 or Windows Media Services, please read my previous blog post.

We'd love to get your feedback on this module - please post a comment below, or join the discussion at the new IIS7 - Media forum.

-Chris